Antmicro Releases an Open-Hardware Development Board for AMD Xilinx's Kintex-7 K410T FPGA

Open hardware expert Antmicro has announced the release of a new open source development board based around the AMD Xilinx Kintex-7 K410T field-programmable gate array (FPGA) — hoping to see it adopted as a go-to prototyping platform for work on open silicon efforts.

"The AMD Xilinx Kintex-7 is a relatively inexpensive and obtainable commodity FPGA family which makes it an excellent prototyping and research platform that is possible to replicate at scale," Antmicro explains. "As it happens, for their default Earl Grey SoC [System on Chip] design the OpenTitan project has also been using a Kintex-7 K410T based FPGA platform. The board is, however, a custom, proprietary design which is hard to come by or replicate.

"Since Antmicro is using OpenTitan as a template for extending the open source SystemVerilog toolchain, to make it easier reproduce the entire design as-is (as an alternative to cutting it down to fit in more approachable hardware) we designed a versatile open hardware Kintex-7 K410T development board."

That development board, which sadly lacks a name more interesting than the "Antmicro Kintex K410T Devboard," pairs the 400k logic-cell AMD Xilinx FPGA with 512MB of DDR3L memory, 256MB of SPI NOR flash, and 8MB of static RAM (SRAM), with the option of two quad-SPI (QSPI) interfaces. There's a gigabit Ethernet port alongside a Fast Ethernet port, an HDMI port for digital video signals, two PMOD connectors for add-on hardware, an FPGA Mezzanine Card Plus (FMC+) connector for even more expansion, and a USB Type-C port which offers JTAG and serial debug capabilities.

For power, the board — which uses the nano-ITX layout — can take input from a DC barrel jack, the gigabit Ethernet port via 40W Power-over-Ethernet Plus-Plus (PoE++), or 45W USB Power delivery (USB-PD) on the USB Type-C connector. There are one each of USB 2.0 Type-C and Type-A host ports, eight indicator LEDs, and user-addressable DIP switch and push-button inputs.

"The open hardware Kintex K410T development provides a useful set of I/Os [Inputs/Outputs] helpful for a variety of ASIC [Application-Specific Integrated Circuit] prototyping scenarios," Antmicro claims. "This includes hardware-in-the-loop testing of designs with multiple IP cores and peripherals, such as OpenTitan and variants thereof.

"The board’s FMC connector and dedicated adapters allow multi-channel data acquisition, making it suitable for fast-turnaround prototyping of multi-channel data acquisition systems. The platform will also be useful as part of the custom runners CI infrastructure we have been developing for heavy ASIC-related CI workloads.

The KiCad design files for the board have been published to the Antmicro GitHub repository under the permissive Apache 2.0 license.